Samsung Galaxy S10e

The Samsung Galaxy S10e has the best overall price, performance, and size for a flagship smartphone today.

March 11, 2019

The Samsung Galaxy S10e has almost everything its bigger siblings do, in a more hand-friendly form factor at a lower price. It even one-ups the more expensive Galaxy phones with a better-located fingerprint sensor and a more case-friendly form factor. At $749.99, it's a perfect staging area to wait for the 5G revolution coming in the next two years, and our first Editors' Choice flagship phone for 2019.

Galaxy S10 Family and Design

Samsung's trio of S10 models offer similar performance, with different physical sizes and prices. The S10e starts at $749. The "regular" S10 costs $899, with a bigger, curved screen, and a 2x zoom camera. Finally, the large Galaxy S10+ starts at $999 and adds a second camera (for depth) on the front.

The S10e isn't actually that much smaller than the S10. It measures 5.6 by 2.8 by 0.3 inches, while the S10 is 5.9 by 2.8 by 0.3 inches. The S10+, meanwhile, measures 6.2 by 2.9 by 0.3 inches. I generally find phones over 2.8 inches wide to require two hands to hold and use.

The S10e comes in black, blue, pink, or white; there's also a yellow color available outside the US. It comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage standard; you can bump up to 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $100 more. There's a microSD card slot in with the SIM card slot, so you can add storage, but that's primarily for media, not for apps.

On the bottom of the phone, you find the main speaker, USB-C port, and a standard headphone jack. Some manufacturers have been trying for years now to kill the headphone jack, but both Samsung and LG are keeping the faith. Like the other models, the S10e is rated IP68 waterproof.

Screen and Fingerprint Sensor

The Galaxy S10e has a 5.8-inch, 19:9, 2,280-by-1,080-pixel display. It's not the 3,040-by-1,440 you see on the bigger models, but dense enough at 438ppi that it's very hard to tell the difference. In terms of pure real estate, it's actually slightly smaller than last year's screen, because it's taller and narrower: It offers 13.01 square inches, compared with 13.23 on the Galaxy S9. It's still plenty big enough.

You can really see the difference from older phones with the new Dynamic AMOLED panel. It's gorgeously bright and colorful. DisplayMate Labs says it's the best mobile display ever, and I don't disagree. I took a closer look at the display with a Klein K-80 colorimeter and SpectraCal's CalMAN software, and the S10e's screen came out with the same brightness and color characteristics as the S10+.

It's a different shape than the S10 and S10+ screens, which curve on the sides. The S10e screen is flat. It feels like there's a little bit of a lip on the edge, but I realized that's just the preinstalled screen protector (all of the S10 phones are slippery, and they're all covered in glass, so get a case).

Like the S10, the S10e has a single hole punch in the upper right corner for its front-facing camera. It mostly lives in the status bar, and I find it less bothersome than the extra-long double punch on the S10+. If you're watching full-screen videos on YouTube, it will take a chunk out of your video, but I think it's less noticeable than a notch, especially since it's up in the corner and not at the midpoint of your view.

Rather than using an in-display fingerprint sensor, the S10e has a fingerprint sensor built into the power button. It's less annoying than the S10's in-display sensor. I find the button's placement excellent; it's where my thumb tends to rest when I'm holding the phone securely. That's very dependent on how you hold the phone, though. I tuck my phones all the way into my palm; if you hold yours halfway up your palm, the sensor will be too high.

The sensor only works if you hit it straight on, and like other oddly positioned sensors, there's a good chance you won't hit it straight on. But it recovers very quickly, and so you can reposition your finger and it works.

Processor and Performance

Under the hood, all the S10 models work pretty much the same. The S10e has 6GB of RAM as opposed to 8GB in the larger units, which results in an occasional app reload if you carousel through a lot of apps, but that isn't really noticeable. Like its siblings, the S10e is one of the first US phones with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 chipset, which offers 40 percent better single-core processor performance and 20 percent better graphics performance than last year's models. It benchmarked effectively the same as its larger sibling. For more details, see our Galaxy S10 benchmarking story.

The S10e also has Qualcomm's latest X24 LTE modem, which is faster than any US carrier is capable of achieving. It also has Wi-Fi 6, which will enable faster speeds on crowded 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks when used with Wi-Fi 6 routers (of which there aren't many out there yet).

Call quality and volume are tuned to be exactly like the S10+. That means reasonable but not blaring volume: 78dB at six inches from the speakerphone and 94 to 96dB measured right up against the earpiece. The phone supports all the latest voice codecs for high-quality voice calling, along with VoLTE and Wi-Fi calling (those last features may be blocked in firmware if you don't buy your phone from a carrier, so get your carrier's model of the phone if you want them).

There is one Galaxy S10e model being sold across all the carriers in the US, so if you unlock it, it should work on all US carriers with their full array of bands. Other countries will have their own Galaxy models that will work better on their networks.

Like the other Galaxy S10 variants, the S10e runs Android Pie 9.0 with Samsung's One UI extensions. One UI is now growing on me after a few weeks. Yes, the icons are too bubbly and cartoonish, but moving menu items in the dialer and messaging app to the bottom of the screen is very convenient. The UI's loose app grid also looks less babyish on the S10e's smaller screen than on the S10+'s big, high-res panel, where it looks like it wastes space.

Yes, the Bixby button remains on the side of this phone. The good news is that you can now remap it to another app, if you like; the bad news is that you can't remap it to Google Assistant. Samsung just needs to give up on Bixby as a voice assistant and go all-in with Google, but it won't.

The Galaxy S10e has a smaller battery, at 3,100mAh, than the S10 (3,400mAh) or the S10+ (4,100mAh). But Samsung has finally gotten power management right, and the results are glorious. We got 11 hours, 42 minutes with the S10e on our video rundown test, just a little less than we did with the S10+, and the phone has been living out just under two days of normal use just fine. Anecdotally, I'm feeling like the S10+ will probably get an extra evening without a recharge, but the S10e will still outplay and outlast most of the other phones out there.

Like the other S10 models, the S10e has Wireless PowerShare, a way to charge other devices wirelessly using the back of the phone. I can't figure out why you'd want to do this except for topping off true wireless earbuds.

Camera

The Galaxy S10e has two cameras, a 12-megapixel main camera and a 16-megapixel, 123-degree wide-angle camera. It's missing the "2x zoom" camera on the larger models, though I personally find the wide-angle camera to offer more exciting composition options.

The quality of two cameras here is the same as on the other S10 models, which is to say, about the same as it is on the S9 models. To see samples, check out my Galaxy S10+ review or my comparions of the phone's night mode and wide-angle capabilities.

The bottom line is that these are very good cameras, on par with other leading camera phones, especially in good light. That said, no other camera phone has yet developed a solid response to Google's groundbreaking Night Sight low-light mode in the Pixel 3, which takes far and away the best low-light images. The wide-angle camera here is wider than LG's, but also a bit softer, with more distortion at the edges, which is the price of fish-eye.

There's a single 10-megapixel front-facing camera, the same as on the other models, but not the secondary depth camera found on the S10+. That means bokeh selfie shots are calculated with software. Compared with the S10+, the S10e's selfie bokeh has slightly greater depth of field—meaning it's a bit less dramatic—and will occasionally hiccup and not properly blur an object in the background, something Samsung can definitely fix in software.

The Galaxy S10 family from left to right: S10e, S10, and S10+

Conclusions

I am biased. I prefer phones that actually fit in my hand, and if anything costs over $1,000, it better have a really good reason to do so. The Samsung Galaxy S10e has all of the key aspects of the S10 series: an amazing screen, a fast processor, a great modem, Wi-Fi 6, a new UI, and a wide-angle camera. But unlike the S10+, it fits in my hand, doesn't weigh a ton, and costs even less than the Google Pixel 3.

Trade-in deals make the price even lower. Jumping up from a Galaxy S8 or an iPhone 7 nets you $300, making the S10e cost a mere $449 and leaving you plenty of budgetary room to jump up to a 5G phone based on Qualcomm's upcoming integrated Snapdragon 865 chipset when your carrier turns on broad 5G coverage in late 2020.

Even with no trade-in and using a monthly payment plan, you're more likely to pay for this phone over two years than three, which is going to put you in a really good position: When S10+ owners are still puttering along on 4G two years from now, you'll be jumping on 5G networks just as they're becoming widely popular in 2021.

Your Android decision is now, really, between three phones. The Pixel 3 has Night Sight, the best low-light camera mode available. That's a big deal. But the Galaxy S10e has faster everything, an even better screen, a wide-angle camera, more camera modes, expandable memory, and it costs $50 less. Both are good choices. There's also the OnePlus 6T, a step down in camera quality, but a terrific phone all around for $580.

Samsung made different choices from Apple this year, and cut fewer corners. The $749 Apple iPhone XR is a different beast from the iPhone XS: It uses a cheaper screen technology and a cheaper modem, part of why I recommended the more expensive models. But the S10e demands fewer compromises from Galaxy owners, and offers performance closer to the higher-end units.

I know my choice isn't necessarily going to be the most popular one: Americans tend to think bigger is better and to go for the top-of-the-line model whenever possible. But I think that the wiser choice here is to go for the smaller, less expensive model. That makes the Samsung Galaxy S10e the best Android phone to buy right now and our Editors' Choice.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.

Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed to the Frommer's series of travel guides and Web sites for more than a decade. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite … See Full Bio